How 2 Hollywood stars plan to save a team, and a town, 'desperate for a lifeline'
LOS ANGELES — Coal and steel built Wrexham, a market town wedged between the Welsh mountains and the lower Dee Valley in northern Wales. But soccer has long sustained it.
The city's team was formed in 1864, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, making it the third oldest in soccer history. And the fortunes of team and town have risen and fallen together ever since.
Both have been in steep decline lately.
Wrexham's Queensway neighborhood, two miles north of the soccer ground, was recently ranked by the Welsh government as the third-most impoverished area in the country, making the bronze statue in the city center — a tribute to the area's long-shuttered mines and steelworks — a taunting reminder of better days gone by. The team, which has dropped to the bottom rungs of British soccer, nearly folded a decade ago before supporters raised $120,000 in seven hours to save the club's place in the lowly National League.
Now, the town and the team are waging a
